MAR. 22, 2003: WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?
URL:http://www.nationalreview.com/frum/frum-diary.asp
The War Abroad
I wrote a long piece about the war for Canada’s National Post this weekend. It will be available online Monday: just click here.
The War At Home
The number of emails I’ve received about my article on antiwar conservatives has just crossed the 350 mark. Of those, fewer than 10 have been negative. The sheer number of the messages prevents me from answering each one, but I’ve read them all and I’m grateful for each and every one of them. With the writers’ permission, I’ll quote a couple more to continue to give readers a sense of the reaction of their fellow-conservatives.
“I read your piece on the "paleocons" and I can only imagine the vitriol you are going to take primarily because you are Jewish. I hope you read this before you are simply deleting all of your messages because of the vile stuff that will becoming your way right now. I voted for Pat Buchanan in the 1992 primary because I thought Bush I was too squishy and remembered the old Reaganite Buchanan, but now he puts me in mind of Westbrook Pegler at the end. I loved "Right from the Beginning" and his defense of Reagan but what has happened to him just baffles and appalls me.
“A problem with the current paleos is that their policies would lead us to be like France, immoral and no more likely to help democracies than dictatorships. The view that America tilts towards the "Jews" rather than the "Arabs" makes no distinctions between the nature of the governments of Israel and the Arab nations. The vast majority of Israelis have no intent to kill all of the Arabs, whereas that can not be said of their opponents. If the Jews ran Israel as the Saudis, for instance, run their country, and vice versa, you would see a very quick switch in the views of American conservatives towards the Jews and the Arabs.
“There is one more point you might have made in your excellent piece (whichwill be a standard on this subject wherever conservatives meet) conservatism is supposed to deal with men and facts as they are. The isolationism of agrarian, rural and small town America was the product of the history and experience of the time. To ignore the technology and reality of your time is not conservative, but utopian. As you point out, Robert Taft and Vandenberg and the rest changed their views because of the world wide threat of the Soviet Union and the atomic bomb. I would like the revival of the British Empire to keep the peace, while we sit back here in the New World safe and quiet. This is nostalgia and foolishness, not policy. Paleoconservatism seems unable to imagine what a world in which the U.S. implemented their policy preferences would look like. It would soon be unrecognizable and far more hostile to this nation than it is now.
“Finally, paleoconservatism has no electoral victories. The white heartland it (by this I mean the mostly Caucasian interior of the country not that whites are the "heart" of the country) the paleos say they speak for is more open handed than the paleos and is also more bellicose abroad African Americans and Hispanics are generally far more ambivalent about the war on Iraq than the white heartland. They are far more protectionist as well. Where does a racialist, isolationist, anti-free trade, anti-war on terror ideology think it will get votes? The Confederate sympathizers of my acquaintance express their patriotism through fervid backing of America's wars and are generally pro-Israel, no votes there either. If your domestic policies alienate all the racial minorities, your foreign policy alienates the Southern and rural conservatives and your economic views alienate economic conservatives, exactly what is left? Oh yeah, say hello to Lenora Fulani et. al.”
And another:
“David,
“I just wanted to chime in on the paleos. First, thank you. It's time
they went the way of Objectivism and the John Birch Society. I used to
be a paleo myself. I worked for Buchanan's campaigns in '92 and '96,
subscribed to "Chronicles," "Sobran's" and the "Rothbard Rockwell
Report," and openly cheered the various little secessionist movements
that those types seemed to think were so important in the early
nineties.
“I once even introduced Lew Rockwell at a YAF convention in Orange County with the phrase, ‘If you want to see what principled conservatism look like, unlike those squishes at the National Review, listen to this man's
words, and learn.’ He then gave a frankly nasty speech on immigration.
At the end, I asked him how he reconciled his call for closed borders
with his opposition to tariffs, and his answer was (to me, surprisingly)
evasive: ‘in my ideal libertarian society, all property would be in
private hands, so immigration would simply be trespassing.’ This left a
nagging suspicion in me that ending immigration was more important to
this economist than, say, a return to the gold standard.
“I joined the Army shortly thereafter and discovered that there was still
a lot to be said about this country, and more specifically, a lot to be
said for a cosmopolitan foreign policy. The naïve isolationism of the
intellectual descendants of Father Coughlin and John Flynn does not hold
up under the scrutiny of military intelligence training. I now believed
them to be childish, but not necessarily malicious, when it came to
foreign policy.
“I do not throw terms like ‘racist’ and ‘anti-semitic’ around lightly;
they are serious charges, and should be reserved for serious,
unambiguous cases. I believed the conservative movement to be almost
completely free of the more virulent strains of racism that had plagued
it in its younger stages, but I cannot do so any longer. Public figures
can be legitimately judged not only by their words and deeds, but by
what they choose to speak and act upon. A genuine anti-semite can keep
from being discovered by simply not bringing up the subject. The paleo
crowd has made itself conspicuous by its determination to identify
itself as explicitly anti-Zionist, which is not necessarily the same
thing as anti-semitic, but one would expect that if their motivations
were truly isolationist and devoted to the principle of home rule, they
would cry foul as frequently at the cases of Tibet, the Kurds, the
Basques, Northern Ireland, Quebec, Chiapas, the Ivory Coast, etc. Of
course, they don't, and there's no indication that they ever will, so
what is presented as anti-internationalism and federalism begins to look
more and more like judenhass.
“Suffice it to say that I run with a different crowd now. My hope lies in
the thought that there are more like me, who want to think the best, but
become disillusioned with them not because of others' arguments against
them, but because of their own arguments, coupled with our own policing
of our movement. Again, thank you for shedding some light on this
subject.”
Oh, and a funny one:
“If the war isn't part of a neocon conspiracy, how do you explain the participation of the aircraft carrier ABRAHAM LINCOLN? Aha! What do you say to that?”
A reader from Rockford, Illinois, wrote in with a just reproach:
“In your recent article "Unpatriotic Conservatives" you mention Chronicles as being located in the ‘...rusting industrial city of Rockford, Illinois...’ While I wholeheartedly agree with your takedown of the loathsome racist Tom Fleming, I am hurt by your description of my hometown, Rockford. Disparaging the city Chronicles is located in as a method of demonstrating scorn for the publication and the individual seen as itsface, Tom Fleming, by extension disparages not only one of your biggest admirers (me), but also reflects poorly on my deceased parents and my twelve brothers and sisters (of whom many are Frum fans) and all the citizens of Rockford. I realize a writer of your considerable talents uses many tools. I hope the next time you use a place where Red Americans live in this fashion, you take a minute to realize you're unintentionally insulting a tens of thousands of people, many of whom admire your talents, and even some who because of your Daily Diary, consider you a friend.”
What can I say to that? Only: He is right, I was wrong – and I apologize.
Not every letter was positive though. The following is one of the more coherent of the negatives. It’s not very nice, but I print it at full length. Was it Aristotle who said that we reveal our characters by our choice of friends? Well, take a look at who is praising the antiwar conservatives as “good, intelligent, and deeply patriotic men.”
“Mr. Frum,
“I have on my desk at work a copy of the very first issue of The National Review. The National Review that you write for today has as much in common with that original edition as a horse has with a horsefly.
“You are not a ‘conservative’ nor are you an ‘American’ as you describe yourself.
“You are a jew. First, last always.
“You have been identified and people are no longer afraid to name the jew and to point out the irrefutable pattern of obfuscation, denial, silence and attacks used in the past to keep Americans from identifying jews as the problem with America. The ability to contain that absolute truth of nature- not rhetoric- has slipped past you while you pontificated about what America is. You wouldn't know, because it was a creation of White men, not jews. A stranger can tell me nothing about my own child and so the jew has nothing to offer me in describing my own nation.
“Jew.
“Enemy of the White Western Man that created our culture and our
civilization. The polio vaccine is not enough to undo the damage caused by the Jew and as a far brighter man than you once observed about you and yours-‘Quickly he turns the attacker's charges back on him, and the attacker becomes the liar, the troublemaker, the terrorist. Same exact enemy. How to respond? Nothing could be more mistaken than to defend oneself. That is just what the Jew wants. He can invent a new lie every day for the enemy to respond to, and the result is that the enemy spends so much time defending himself that he has no time to do what the Jew really fears: to attack.’
“It is time to step up to the plate and men, good men, intelligent and deeply patriotic men are doing just that.
“I served my country in combat and so did my father and his father before him, for our people, not for yours- I don't fear conflict like the Fleishers, Perles, Wolfowitzes, Kissingers, Feiths, Abrams and Frums- I relish it.What unit did you serve in, chickenhawk?
“No one cares about the labels anymore, no one cares about the smears.We want our nation back, and we will have it.It doesn't belong to you and it never has. So call me what you like, for I know what you are- Jew.”
08:55 AM
MAR. 21, 2003: RESOLVED
Resolved
Six months ago, Congress authorized a war against Saddam Hussein. Today the legislators will continue debating a resolution to support that war. Strange, no?
Democrats are complaining about the “partisanship” of Republicans who force them to declare themselves. They want to keep their options open – like Tom Daschle, who votes for the war and then denounces it, who says he supports the troop but who opposes the job that those troops are doing.
Nor is Daschle the only Democrat playing a double game. Nancy Pelosi, the Democrats’ leader in the House, also claims to “support the troops.” But in a speech two weeks ago at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, she mused regretfully that the Iraq war could have been prevented “if the people had gone onto the streets five months ago in these numbers in our country and around the world ....”
It’s time to lay down some standards here. Many Democrats opposed the war with Iraq. That’s their prerogative of course – and if the war ends badly it will equally be their prerogative to say “We told you so.” But while the war is on – while American forces are engaged in combat – it is their duty to say nothing that might tend to embolden or sustain the enemy.
I happened to catch Kenneth Pollack, author of The Threatening Storm on the Charlie Rose show last night. Pollack is no supporter of President Bush’s. He is a very reluctant Iraq hawk, a veteran of the Clinton National Security Council who spent much of the 1990s opposing military action to overthrow Saddam. I don’t know whether he is literally a Democrat or not, but his general outlook on the world appears to resemble that of Tom Daschle much more than that of George W. Bush.
Yet here is what he had to say, based on my hasty notes. Saddam knows that his regular army cannot stop the United States. His plan is to retreat into Baghdad behind his best troops, to create what he hopes willl be – in Pollack’s phrase “a Mesopotamian Stalingrad.” Not that Saddam imagines that he can win this battle – but he does hope that if he can extend it long enough, the antiwar movements in the West will somehow force Bush to halt the campaign. In other words: the protesters are Saddam’s best hope.
Democratic pols should think hard about that before playing footsie with them.
12:42 AM
MAR. 20, 2003: TWO FROM READERS
From John J. Vecchione
Washington, D.C.
I read your piece on the "paleocons" and I can only imagine the vitriol you are going to take primarily because you are Jewish. I hope you read this before you are simply deleting all of your messages because of the vile stuff that will becoming your way right now. I voted for Pat Buchanan in the 1992 primary because I thought Bush I was too squishy and remembered the old Reaganite Buchanan, but now he puts me in mind of Westbrook Pegler at the end. I loved "Right from the Beginning" and his defense of Reagan but what has happened to him just baffles and appalls me.
A problem with the current paleos is that their policies would lead us to be like France, immoral and no more likely to help democracies than dictatorships. The view that America tilts towards the "Jews" rather than the "Arabs" makes no distinctions between the nature of the governments of Israel and the Arab nations. The vast majority of Israelis have no intent to kill all of the Arabs, whereas that can not be said of their opponents. If the Jews ran Israel as the Saudis, for instance, run their country, and vice versa, you would see a very quick switch in the views of American conservatives towards the Jews and the Arabs.
There is one more point you might have made in your excellent piece (which will be a standard on this subject wherever conservatives meet) conservatism is supposed to deal with men and facts as they are. The isolationism of agrarian, rural and small town America was the product of the history and experience of the time. To ignore the technology and reality of your time is not conservative, but utopian. As you point out, Robert Taft and Vandenberg and the rest changed their views because of the world wide threat of the Soviet Union and the atomic bomb. I would like the revival of the British Empire to keep the peace, while we sit back here in the New World safe and quiet. This is nostalgia and foolishness, not policy. Paleoconservatism seems unable to imagine what a world in which the U.S. implemented their policy preferences would look like. It would soon be unrecognizable and far more hostile to this nation than it is now.
Finally, paleoconservatism has no electoral victories. The white heartland it (by this I mean the mostly Caucasian interior of the country not that whites are the "heart" of the country) the paleos say they speak for is more open handed than the paleos and is also more bellicose abroad African Americans and Hispanics are generally far more ambivalent about the war on Iraq than the white heartland. They are far more protectionist as well. Where does a racialist, isolationist, anti-free trade, anti-war on terror ideology think it will get votes? The Confederate sympathizers of my acquaintance express their patriotism through fervid backing of America's wars and are generally pro-Israel, no votes there either. If your domestic policies alienate all the racial minorities, your foreign policy alienates the Southern and rural conservatives and your economic views alienate economic conservatives, exactly what is left? Oh yea, say hello to Lenora Fulani et. al....
From Sean Nelson
Washington, D.C.
I just wanted to chime in on the paleos. First, thank you. It's time
they went the way of Objectivism and the John Birch Society. I used to
be a paleo myself. I worked for Buchanan's campaigns in '92 and '96,
subscribed to "Chronicles," "Sobran's" and the "Rothbard Rockwell
Report," and openly cheered the various little secessionist movements
that those types seemed to think were so important in the early
nineties.
I once even introduced Lew Rockwell at a YAF convention in Orange County
with the phrase "If you want to see what principled conservatism looks
like, unlike those squishes at the National Review, listen to this man's
words, and learn." He then gave a frankly nasty speech on immigration.
At the end, I asked him how he reconciled his call for closed borders
with his opposition to tariffs, and his answer was (to me, surprisingly)
evasive: "in my ideal libertarian society, all property would be in
private hands, so immigration would simply be trespassing." This left a
nagging suspicion in me that ending immigration was more important to
this economist than, say, a return to the gold standard.
I joined the Army shortly thereafter and discovered that there was still
a lot to be said about this country, and more specifically, a lot to be
said for a cosmopolitan foreign policy. The naïve isolationism of the
intellectual descendants of Father Coughlin and John Flynn does not hold
up under the scrutiny of military intelligence training. I now believed
them to be childish, but not necessarily malicious, when it came to
foreign policy.
I do not throw terms like "racist" and "anti-semitic" around lightly;
they are serious charges, and should be reserved for serious,
unambiguous cases. I believed the conservative movement to be almost
completely free of the more virulent strains of racism that had plagued
it in its younger stages, but I cannot do so any longer. Public figures
can be legitimately judged not only by their words and deeds, but by
what they choose to speak and act upon. A genuine anti-semite can keep
from being discovered by simply not bringing up the subject. The paleo
crowd has made itself conspicuous by its determination to identify
itself as explicitly anti-Zionist, which is not necessarily the same
thing as anti-semitic, but one would expect that if their motivations
were truly isolationist and devoted to the principle of home rule, they
would cry foul as frequently at the cases of Tibet, the Kurds, the
Basques, Northern ireland, Quebec, Chiapas, the Ivory Coast, etc. Of
course, they don't, and there's no indication that they ever will, so
what is presented as anti-internationalism and federalism begins to look
more and more like judenhass.
Suffice it to say that I run with a different crowd now. My hope lies in
the thought that there are more like me, who want to think the best, but
become disillusioned with them not because of others' arguments against
them, but because of their own arguments, coupled with our own policing
of our movement. Again, thank you for shedding some light on this
subject.
12:13 PM
MAR. 20, 2003: CORRECTION
In the paleos piece, I refer to the antiwar conservative Eric Margolis as "foreign editor of the Toronto Sun." Margolis, a frequent guest at CNN, is a foreign affairs columnist at the Toronto Sun, but not editor.
08:56 AM
MAR. 19, 2003: WAR
H-Hour
As I write, the whole world is waiting for news from Iraq. We are hearing that the president will address the nation at 10:15. Our hopes and prayers are with the U.S. and allied forces and the president. Some thoughts to fill the tense interval till then:
Back at the Old Stand
No, I wasn’t enjoying some prolonged St. Patrick’s Day bender. I was desperately finishing the long article on paleoconservatism for the issue of NR that went to press yesterday.
I suppose the first thing I want to say is “thank you.” I heard from nearly 100 readers in the first 12 hours that the piece was up. It wasn’t possible to respond to each of them individually, but I appreciated the kind words. And thanks too to my colleagues on The Corner, who gave the piece such a vigorous send-off yesterday.
Two of them raise points that call for quick reply.
1. John Derbyshire suggests that we owe the paleos a debt of gratitude for keeping the immigration-reform issue alive. I think it’s closer to the truth that they have nearly killed it. Think how amazing it is that not even the revelations that the INS sent posthumous visas to 9/11 killers could make immigration a political issue. That tells you something about how radioactive the paleos have rendered the issue. I think too that the paleos’ hostility to the war on terror has inhibited from effectively making a connection between the war and immigration. It’s odd, isn’t it, to say “I want to curb immigration so as to more successfully prosecute a war I oppose?”
2. Mark Krikorian questions my inclusion of Robert Novak among the paleoconservatives. I should have thought the evidence spoke for itself. If not, there’s a lot more of it. But maybe the real question is the significance of the evidence. Let’s recall that it was Winston Churchill himself who identified the great obstacles to victory in wartime as “defeatism, discouragement, and disillusionment.” Novak began spreading all three within minutes of the 9/11 attack.
More on Paleos
One subject I did not tackle in my piece was the obsessive hatred that so many of the paleos feel for Abraham Lincoln. I discovered late, though, that Lincoln was not unique: The LewRockwell.com site hates Winston Churchill nearly as passionately. As I read their fulminations, I realized how much the Rockwellites reminded me of the Nazi playwright in the movie, “The Producers”: “Hitler vas a better painter than Shursheel, Hitler vas a better dancer than Shursheel ...”
Companion Volume
I have to draw attention too to the very fine piece by Byron York in the current NR over Grover Norquist, a Washington activist who has made himself some very disturbing new friends. There are one or two details to add to this story – but they can wait until the news from the warzone arrives.
11:55 PM |
